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Doomsday Clock is now 30 seconds closer to midnight

Posted: Feb 01 2017 02:26AM CST

Video Posted: Feb 01 2017 02:27AM CST

Updated: Feb 01 2017 02:27AM CST

LOS ANGELES -

Humanity is now 30 seconds closer to annihilation, according to scientists.

The Doomsday Clock is a symbolic warning about how close the world is to existential or nuclear catastrophe, and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists [http://thebulletin.org] announced that humanity is facing the greatest dangers since the Cold War. It now reads two-and-a-half minutes to “midnight”-- when the world ends.

The announcement was made by Dr. Rachel Bronson, the executive director and publisher of the bulletin. According to the New York Times, she noted that the 30-second increase was an attention-catching signal that was meant to acknowledge “what a dangerous moment we’re in, and how important it is for people to take note.”

The Doomsday Clock, used to warn humanity of existential threats, is the closest its been to midnight since 1953 https://t.co/EtIIVYyljA

Climate change, nuclear threats, and other emerging dangers such as fake news and cyber terrorism factor into where scientists set the clock.

Based on the board’s conclusions, the minute hand has swayed closer and farther from midnight 22 times during the clock’s history. Our “safest” time was 1991, when we had a whole 17 minutes until destruction. It was a year that saw the official end of the Cold War and a reduction in nuclear arsenals.

The closest we’ve come to our theoretical destruction came in 1953 when both the U.S. and the Soviet Union tested their first thermonuclear weapons. The clock stood at 2 minutes until midnight -- the only time in 64 years it’s been closer than it is now.

Scientists confirmed that Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump’s loose nuclear rhetoric played a part, as well as the new administration’s stance on global warming.

Luckily the clock is hypothetical, and there is still time to do something about it. Watch the video to see how the clock moved 30 seconds closer to midnight.